Why I write science fiction

In my last blog I questioned if blogging was wasting my time. I concluded it was, but it wasn’t all the time if that makes sense. I don’t want to stop blogging, I enjoy it. However, I did need to reassess my blog, content, timing, frequency etc. so that it both works for me and of course provides entertaining and interesting content for the reader. So having taken a little blog holiday I’m back. And for this first in a new era I thought I should go back to the beginning and explain why I feel compelled to write science fiction.

I’ve blogged before on how science fiction gets labelled with ‘genre’ fiction as if it is somehow inferior or something you should just whisper in case you offend some one. And that’s just reading Sci-fi. As for writing the stuff, it seems these days erotic fiction is more acceptable. I have had it suggested to me that I should write erotic science fiction, but I won’t go into that.

So why do I feel compelled to write science fiction? First of all, I am a scientist, a Zoologist and I worked in a science based industry, Pharmaceuticals. I also like to think I have an active imagination. Put the two together and you can’t help but wonder where science is taking us in the future. What wonders, and/or potential horrors are round the corner, even if that corner lies hundreds or thousands of years in the future. I must admit I find it hard to understand how we are not all interested in those futures. After, all it may not affect us, but it will affect or children, grandchildren etc. You can read sci-fi and say that’ll never happen, but I bet that was said about space flight and many aspects of modern medicine not that long ago. From my point of view, if we can imagine it then there is every chance it could happen or at least something like it.

So I imagine and a I write, influenced (even if it’s subconsciously) by what is going on in the world. In ‘Project Noah’ we’re making a mess of the planet (if we’re not already doing so) and the plan is to take tens of thousands first to Mars and then beyond, which doesn’t seem that much of a stretch from what we are planning now. ‘Bleak’ explores one aspect of possible designer people. OK it’s set far in the future on another world, but we’re already manipulating people and have the potential to interfere with the human genome in ways that even a few years ago would have seemed like science fiction. So who knows what might be possible? For me the answer is anything. I also believe that at some point the distinction between what is human and what is machine will be blurred to the point that it doesn’t matter. Now that might seem a horrific prospect, but as I see it no more horrific than some of the things we are doing to each other now.

So this is it, a return to what motivated me to blog in the first place – science and science fiction. I won’t abandon everything else completely, however, my focus will be on exploring the issues and subjects that science fiction (especially my own) raises, a couple of which I’ve touched on above. The great thing about sc-fi is there is no limit on where it can take you /what issues and subjects you can explore.

I hope you’ll enjoy it and if you do why not give my books a try, others have enjoyed them.

6 thoughts on “Why I write science fiction”

I enjoy reading your blogs and agree that Sci-Fi along with other fictional material allow us to look at many venues and possibilities. I write more in the current and near term settings (I thought my first book was just an action story but an Editor told me I couldn’t publish it as it violated the genre’ but that it was “Paranormal-Romance”). My vampires fight against the Bram-Stoker type as well as human criminals and evil politicians in Washington D.C. and China. In fiction I can explore all sorts of evil that would get me “disappeared” or winding up like Vince Foster if done in non-fictional writings. The third in my series: Immortal Relations Coming Out hammers the current regime in Washington and finishes with the potential ELE of the asteroid Ceres heading for Earth and what is done by countries (not including the U.S.) to prevent the impact.

I enjoy reading science fiction. I think it’s a good milieu in which to explore themes you couldn’t explore otherwise. I’m not well grounded in the sciences, though, so I’ve not tried to write it, at least not seriously. I did write a novella length bit of erotic science fiction once, which I quite liked for a while. Then I realized that it was just erotica with a futuristic excuse. It burst into flames in the waste basket.

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